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Deconstructing the PC Revolution
coondoggie writes to mention that room-sized computers and other recollections were shared over the weekend at the Vintage Computer Festival in Silicon Valley. "About 200 people, many of them of the gray-haired pony tail, bifocals and middle-age paunch variety, attended the event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif."
From the article: One of the first microprocessors on the market, the Intel 4004 introduced in 1971, featured 4-bit computing, a 750KHz clock, completed 75,000 instructions per second, held 4KB of ROM and 640 bytes of RAM.
"By today's standards, this is totally unremarkable," said Tim McNerney
Unremarkable is a 5-year old processor. But when things are the first of their kind, they will always be remarkable by any standard.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
From the article: The refrigerator-sized machine stored just 5Mb of data. Hoagland's PowerPoint presentation on the restoration project, at 9.16MB, would have crashed it.
I'll bet that the old guys who wrote it were smart enough to actually check the size of a file before copying it -- you know, actually worrying about resource management. Not like these young pups who think that CPU speeds and hard disk space are so large as to be infinite and not worth bothering with.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Explaining how we would never need a massive life controlling server in our own home, which Microsoft still thinks they can sell us all via the XBox.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I knew someone who tried to explain how a LP record works to his kids. They were incredulous. Groves recording sound?! It wasn't digital?!? No way!
I can just imagine what kids will say a few years from now: "You carried your computers in bags?! They were that big?!"
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
You don't have to be "old" or even middle-aged to appreciate history.
I'm 21, and boy, I really want to see that RAMAC head moving from platter to platter in person! Then again, I do have 3 antique tractors in my Garage...
If it wasn't on the other side of the country, I would have gone.
Why can't Pittsburgh, the host of the winners of the DARPA competition, get some antique PC lovin'? All we got is washing machine engines.
Coming from the future, Bill and Ted's time machine phonebox lands in Silicon Valley.
Bill: "Hey Ted, I found a copy of Microsoft Vista!"
Ted: "Vintage cr@p."
Take Nobody's Word For It.
'Cause he's an old hippie
And he don't know what to do
Should he hang on to the old
Should he grab on to the new.
He's an old hippie
This new life is just a bust
He ain't trying to change nobody
He's just trying real hard to adjust.
It's hit some people in Silicon Valley hard, the ones who don't keep up. Anyone who's been to the Hacker's Conference in the last decade will recognize this.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Because to us, Vista is cutting-edge crap.
...every time I deconstruct a revolution, the same thing happens. I put it all back together, and there's one piece left over, and I can't figure out where it goes.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
I feel like the bloat argument has been being over-used lately. Yes, computers are more powerful and doing similar tasks. But they also tend to be more user friendly and over all the user experience is much nicer. They also have to cater to a much broader audience then they used to.
Quack, quack.
If you're in the Bay Area (or ever come for a visit) you should definitely visit the Computer History Museum. I lived about four blocks from there in Mountain View for a number of years, but never went because it didn't sound too interesting. Then my new company held a function there.
./? who isn't!) and you get the chance, you should visit this place. Very cool
It is a really great place to see the history of computers come to life. They have a number of retirees from IBM and other computer companies as docents who lead tours and know a lot about the old machines they have there. There's even a room where they're working to restore old punch-card reading machines to a working state.
If you're at all interested in computers (on
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Sure, you can call your current email client the "same basic thing" as PINE or whatever you were using a decade ago-- but that's a bit dishonest. It's like calling a Honda Civic "the same basic thing" as a covered wagon. It's not all bloat, and not all of the bloat is there for no reason.
.net framework for some 15k utility app you downloaded, but without the .net framework... would the guy who wrote it have had the time to code up all the support and infrastructure he needed? Sure, you could argue his approach was "lazy," but that's precisely the point. And even leaving frameworks like .net aside, not everybody has the time or inclination to turn out tightly optimized assembly code for an app that tags your mp3 files based on parsed filename text or that rotates all your jpegs based on exif data. Sure, it could run much faster if meticulously optimized... but if that sort of work was required to put the app out, it never would have been written in the first place.
Some of what you think of as "bloat" is what made the applications you're using feasible in the first place. It's annoying to need the whole
again, it's features. Your copy of Office 2007 can do a lot more then your original word processor. Same can be said (hesitantly) for Aero and the host of other new features in Microsoft's latest release. Some users fit into the 'less is more' category (at least some of the time) but I'd argue more users like being able to do more even if in some ways that means they have less. Otherwise we'd be running thin clients (smarter) and everyone would be happy.
I think the bloat argument presupposes that engineers and developers are fools, which isn't the (often) the case and pushes the market demands out of the conversation. And everyone's new favorite example (Vista) is really only a good example of Redmonds strangely disconnected view of their own marketplace, which isn't entirely new.
Quack, quack.
Although the TRS-80 was launched the same year as the Apple II and the Commodore PET personal computers... it benefited from the distribution network and brand identity of Radio Shack.
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that. Is anyone else here old enough to remember when Radio Shack had a positive brand identity?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
A short time ago I took an introductory class on VHDL programming wherein we had a project assigned to re-implement the functionality of the Intel 8080 using an FPGA; with the addition of a custom built-in MPU. It took a bit of work (a few weeks to work out the bugs and setup a testbench), but technically it was "unremarkable".
I'm writing this post from a PC based on an Athlon XP 3000+, which is somewhere around 5-6 years old, perhaps more. I would gather that implementing this CPU on an FPGA isn't going to be part of any introductory classes on VHDL anytime soon, and not because FPGA technology isn't up to snuff (which it isn't), but rather because the knowledge and concepts needed to do so are not currently in the domain of DIY. By no means am I trying to set a benchmark for the word "unremarkable", but lets give some respect where it is due. Even 5 year-old CPUs are seriously remarkable. I dunno about anyone else, but I'm not anywhere near standing on the shoulders of those giants.
'Cause he's an old hippie And he don't know what to do Should he hang on to the old Should he grab on to the new. He's an old hippie This new life is just a bust He ain't trying to change nobody He's just trying real hard to adjust. I have been in IT since 1973, still have you one trick Java Ponies for breakfast (with a weak cup of tea)
You never catch me alive
This is exactly the spot the awesome funds donor in the auction needs to step forward!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I think it boils down to your definition of "remarkable."
Something might be technically unremarkable, by today's standards, but still hugely remarkable in the historical sense, because it was the first of its kind.
As a more extreme example, I have a pocket calculator that can do more than the original ENIAC, but that doesn't mean that ENIAC is any less remarkable, when considered in the context of when it was developed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
How about deconstructing use of the word deconstructing? Like in pretentious twat?
I get a goofy grin every time I go to the Museum of American History in Washington, DC and see the truly impressive collection of gear they've got.
Makes me want to spend some time in the not-displayed area, and see what they've got (MX missile control panels? Russian analog pneumatic computers? The mind boggles).
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?